What Good Looks Like – Leading, Failing & Evolving - Chris Wahl

In this episode, Johan and Jeffrey sit down with industry legend and long-time community contributor Chris Wahl to explore a career journey that spans from VI admin to independent content creator and platform engineer. Chris shares his unique take on working symbiotically with developers, learning from failures (including a UCS upgrade gone nuclear), and the importance of showing what good looks like rather than just telling.

⏱️ Highlights:

00:37 – Meet Chris Wahl: Blogger, technologist, gamer, legend

03:00 – The IKEA Wheel and unwinding with brutal dungeon games

05:00 – Rapid fire: Terraform, PowerShell, Kubernetes vs vSphere

08:30 – Career evolution: From vSphere to Kubernetes and AWS

12:30 – Drinking from the firehose: Adapting to cloud-native

18:00 – Developers vs IT: Building a real Dev+Platform culture

22:00 – When Shit Hit the Fan: How a UCS upgrade took down a 5,000-person org

30:00 – Chris’s Life Lesson: “Don’t tell people what good looks like—show them.”

👤 Guest:

Chris Wahl